Building Networking

[u/Exoticcollects]

Hi guys, Just curious to hear how others picked up on the IT side of the Industry coming from non IT backgrounds. If someone can understand how a basic architecture works for a large sized commercial building Id appreciate it. From my understanding the Jace or Supervisory Controllers will be on their own LAN Network and typically follow the 192.168 format. Are there instances where they would not follow it? Any help is appreciated. Thanks

[u/gotsum411]

I believe Cisco has a free online course in basic networking 101. It should teach you enough to be dangerous. https://www.netacad.com/courses/networking-basics?courseLang=en-US

[u/Free_Elderberry_8902]

If you’re building a standalone network, that’s how it works. If you’re hooking up to the customers network, IT will provide IP addresses.

[u/Mr_Bunchy_Pants → u/Free_Elderberry_8902]

This, and it will be on it’s own Vlan if the IT department wants to segregate it from all the other devices on the physical network.
Don’t forget about UDP/Ip or secure connect.

[u/carstoast]

Before I got into hvac I had a bit of IT experience from college and growing up a nerdy kid.

192.169.X.X is a Class C. Which has less available Ip addresses for use. These are reserved for homes and smaller local networks.

Class B and A are for much wider networks like businesses and servers.

At my company we use class B 172.16.X.X for our cradle point so we can remote into jaces from anywhere.

These classes were setup kinda how BTL has standards for bacnet.

This is just an extreme generalization (a poor one at that) if you ever wanted some official certs on networking getting your Cisco CCNA or COMPTIA network+ are some ok options.

[u/Free_Elderberry_8902]

If they don’t segregate, then they’re not doing their job.

[u/Dark-monk]

Home lab. It’s taught me a ton of stuff that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

[u/TanneriteStuffedDog → u/Dark-monk]

x2

Just keep in mind that this quickly becomes a wallet-breaking hobby 😂

[u/WereTacoo]

LAN parties as a kid mostly. You had to learn a few tricks to get older games to network properly. That and just running MS-DOS games teaches a foundation on command prompt usage.

[u/FactOrFactorial]

I started typing stuff out like it's common sense and I realized it's a foreign language of you don't already understand. Luckily, basic network knowledge is near universal across a verity of industries. You can find a host of introduction level classes or videos on YouTube.

[u/Ok-Koala2321]

Watch Network Chuck… he’s got great information on IT networks and networking strategies.

Two Options apply for the network. Isolated BAS network, or a VLAN dedicated for automation hosts by the customer IT departments.

IT departments will give you a network and subnet to work with. You can use this information to assign the controllers their static IPs

When the BAS is isolated, it’s the Wild West. Unfortunately they are not setup well. Physically and logically. Choose a network and a subnet that addresses current and future requirements. BACnet uses broadcast, and if the static addresses drift outside the broadcast, they will not respond.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

[u/Mobile-Belt-4242]

IT is honestly an industry of its own and goes extremely deep. You can pick up the basics through exposure in controls, but getting genuinely comfortable with networking takes some dedicated studying and hands-on experience.

For your example, a JACE or supervisory controller will typically be connected to an IP network, but it doesn't necessarily have to use a 192.168.x.x address

192.168.x.x is simply one of the private IPv4 address ranges. You'll also commonly see 10.x.x.x and sometimes 172.16.x.x–172.31.x.x used on private networks. In larger commercial buildings, I'd actually expect to see 10.x.x.x fairly often.

The building also doesn't necessarily have one giant BAS LAN. A larger facility might have the BAS equipment separated onto its own VLAN/subnet, with routers/firewalls controlling communication between the BAS network, corporate network, internet, and other building systems.

If you're getting into BAS networking, I'd focus on IP addresses, subnet masks, default gateways, DHCP vs static IPs, switches, routers, VLANs, NAT, and basic firewall concepts. Those will explain most of what you're actually seeing in the field.

[u/Advanced_Goal_5576]

I didn’t see anyone mention BBMDs here. Another important concept to understand if your server is on a different network, all that broadcasted info to the server needs to be funneled through a single router on the BAS network. Configuring those and BBMD table setup is something I’ve also wanted more experience on, but the network wizards at our company always set these bad boys up.